Why Is Documentation Important?

One topic that comes hand in hand with performance management is documentation or, more specifically, HR’s need for documentation in a variety of scenarios. In the classic case, if you need to begin proceedings to terminate an employee, you will be asked for documentation to support that decision. It’s important to realize that this is not HR’s attempt to second-guess or circumvent your decision. This is a legal requirement: The company needs to have admissible evidence on hand in the event that the terminated employee alleges discrimination, wrongful termination, or breach of contract.

For that reason, HR will often have “official” places where documentation must live. If you do not keep documentation there, no action will be possible until you do. In many cases, HR will work with you to assemble that documentation, but much of the time it will not be something you can reasonably assemble after the fact. If the employee didn’t meet your expectations back in March, you need to have notes from March to that effect, or it will seem like you are trying to retroactively come up with something. (It will also undercut your management’s faith in you as a leader: “Why didn’t you do something about it back then?”) Tracking incidents, examples, and observations needs to be something you’re doing in real time, not months after the fact.

Aside from the admittedly negative scenarios around the need for documentation, you’ll want to keep data on your employees for positive scenarios, too. When writing a performance review of your employee, for example, make sure you don’t fall victim to “Recency Bias,” in which only the most recent actions show up in the review because they’re top-of-mind as you write it.

Also, your boss might ask you an on-the-spot question about someone on your team, and you need to have something to refer back to quickly so as to be able to offer up concrete examples (good or bad) of that employee’s work. If your company is large enough to have an HR department with a compensation analysis team—the group that will examine salaries at the company and compare them to industry averages—that team will often be involved in any promotion or salary bonus/raise reward. That team will request examples that justify the raise.

We often talk about the importance of documentation of code, but “people documentation” is equally, if not more, important. Documentation is your friend, so get into the habit of taking notes. These notes also provide you an option to reflect back on your interactions with and observations of that employee during quiet times, such as plane flights, before or after meetings, or even walks from one office building to another. This helps you spot the patterns that emerge only when you look across the aggregate of somebody’s actions.

Keep in mind, too, that there are always two sets of documentation that any manager keeps: the official documentation in the HR-determined location and your own “unofficial” notes that HR might not see. I use the words “official” and “unofficial” very deliberately here. HR departments will often insist that the only documentation they will recognize for a particular action (good or bad) will be the notes in the official location. That means that you will be responsible for taking your notes and copying them (possibly in a cleaned-up form) from your “unofficial” storage location to the official one. Be aware that technically, even your personal notes could be subpoenaed in the event of a lawsuit, but much will depend on the context of the situation. As with any legal concern you have at work, if you have any concerns, you should talk with your HR and/or Legal folks to get their specific take. But the “official” documentation system is often clunky and difficult to use in the heat of the moment, and in the heat of the moment is precisely when you will capture the best notes. So get in the habit of taking notes, and then later you can decide what goes into the “official” storage and what remains in your own private storage.

These notes are not just for your benefit—they’re for the benefit of your team as well when a new manager comes in after you (temporarily or permanently) surrender the leader’s chair. Too often, when a new manager takes over the team, they inherit a group of people for which they have no history or experience. Which employees have been doing well prior to now? Which ones poorly? Sometimes a new manager can help shake things up within the team and give the less-well-performing members a chance to “reset” and improve, but you definitely don’t want the well-performing members taking a hit during their performance review because the new leader doesn’t know all the good work they’ve done. Keeping notes someplace where that new manager can find them can make a huge difference for a manager who desperately wants to create a good connection with their new team.

Personally, I keep the “official” notes in whatever system HR asks me to, and I usually populate it in a cadence strictly according to the official performance review schedule. I keep my “unofficial” and personal notes in a written journal so that there is no electronic record anywhere (where it could be hacked). That way I have copies of my notes after I’ve left the company, just in case I want to remember a particular situation or ever need to offer up testimony on something that happened eight years and three companies ago. (Just because you’ve left the company doesn’t mean you can’t be called back to testify in a lawsuit years later.) On a happier (and more frequent) note, in the past I’ve been asked to offer up an endorsement on LinkedIn for former employees. Having my personal notes from that time period helps me write timely—and accurate—endorsements, which in turn lets me help my former employees even if they no longer report to me!